Dangerous Jam

Thirteen duels and an orgy.

I'm getting an internal server error about every other time I try to upload a photo, so this is really laborious. As a result, I'm only pasting a few select shots rather than everything that looks cool.

The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, misc street shots, zombie with machete in his head.

The Eiffel Tower by night.

View from second floor of Eiffel Tower. That's Napoleon's tomb.

Small, adorable child sucking on Eiffel Tower-shaped lollipop.

Aliens have landed at the Louvre! No, it's just I. M. Pei's incongruously modern entrance.

A zombie with a machete in his head. Okay, I'm sure this is just a martyr, but if anyone has any info that might shed some additional light on this peculiar painting, let me know. It's at the Louvre and I didn't write down the name of the artist.

Look! The Winged Victory of Samothrace!

This statue is amazing in person. The photo doesn't do it justice. It's at the top of a huge flight of stairs, and beautifully framed by multiple arches.

An amazing piece of outdoor art. The entire wall of a large modern building was made into a living, thriving forest floor.

Your zombie there is Peter Martyr/Peter of Verona, who is somewhat inexplicably popular in certain parts. I assume the painting is by a Veronese artist (I probably should know, but I don't). The woman presumably is the person who commissioned it.

Some of those Northern Italian artists had very morbid sensibilities. The gray zombie skin tone seems not out of place for the period. Also, since Peter Martyr's entire identity revolves around him being, as the name says, martyred, the painter may have felt he ought to play that aspect up more.

I don't think this is a major Veronese artist; there's a clumsiness in the depiction of the woman in particular; but the sensibility somewhat recalls Cosme Tura (Ferrarese, mid 15th-cent). It's late Renaissance northern, in any case. I'll see if I can track it down any further.

Ah, I see someone else found the artist on Google. So yes, Northern Italian (though Milanese rather than Veronese school), late Renaissance. And apparently a little bit fixated on making dead people look REALLY dead ...

I now can't remember who the painter was (but it was someone very famous), but at the Prado in Madrid, I remember a disturbing crucifixion painting in which Jesus looked very realistically dead. It was startling because, I realized, I'd never seen that depicted before - he was always either still alive or more poetically and artistically dead, not an actual corpse.

And then I continued exploring the museum and found several more in that vein, and not all by the same artists, either.

Yes, mom took them. (Not the one in the icon.) She's very talented, I think.

The fat thing is clearly projection. She worries that she is fat. (She isn't, either.) Also, my stomach is not and never has been perfectly flat.

Baba taught everything ever, in a very vague manner. If I'd said, "Baba said not to get too hung up on your physical form," she'd have retorted, "Baba told Eruch he needed to eat more greens, so clearly he cared about his followers' physical health."

Google is a splendid thing. I just typed "saint martyr axe head" into the search field, and it looks to me as if what you've got there is a painting of Saint Peter of Verona.

Probably a touch more focused Googling could get you the artist and maybe even the identity of the woman (who, I'd guess, would be a relative of the person who commissioned the painting, not someone in the saint's official story). From the style, I'd hazard late 14th or early 15th century, although I might be off -- her clothes are somewhat old-fashioned, but her hair is in the style worn by contemporary women in Botticelli's and Da Vinci's portraiture, so try around there. The perspective's a little flat, which argues early, but there are some of the same effects Da Vinci used (look at the trees to the side), so my best guess is contemporary of Da Vinci but not quite as skilled as he was.

(If I won the lottery tonight, I would ditch the medical billing & coding program, and enroll as a part-time degree-seeking student in art history, because I love it, although it's not exactly something that leads to a lucrative career.)

And I was wrong on my initial guess for the dates, but totally right about the Da Vinci influence, because he apparently "fell under the beneficient influence of," which I ASSUME means painterly studying and not gettin' it on, because of the "beneficient," and the woman was indeed characterized as a "donor."

Huh. I had that one tagged in my brain as "Diane de Poitiers and somebody," but apparently I had it cross-filed with one of Diane de Poitiers that was ALSO topless and where her boobs had the same shape and the same implausible nipples. if it's symbolic in the manner they say it is, they had a VERY different symbolic language at the time.

"Plugs" are probably lardons, or delicious, somewhat oversized (at least by American convention) bits of bacon. As in, they're not so much made from diced breakfast rashers of bacon, they're more chunky.

My guess is that that painting is very early Mannerist, when really odd, disturbingly realistic paintings were mixed with supernatural elements. Very peculiar and sometimes disturbing in the early 1500s, like when one eye would be all pupil, or a perfectly painted hand would have six or even seven fingers.